Theatre of the Oppressed

Theatre of the Oppressed is a genre of theatre devised in the 1970s by the Brazilian director Augusto Boal. This methodological approach, and its associated repertoire of theatre-based methods (sometimes called games, tools or techniques), continues to be used in various parts of the world in research, community development, education, political activist and therapeutic settings. Associated practices include Theatre for Development, Theatre in Schools, Theatre for Living, Applied Theatre and Popular Theatre, among others. It is an approach to theatre that is intentional in its desire to shed light on social issues of oppression and marginalization.

Theatre of the Oppressed was founded on three main techniques: (1) Image Theatre, (2) Invisible Theatre and (3) Forum Theatre. Boal's later works include ‘Cops in the Head’, ‘Rainbow of Desire’ and ‘Legislative Theatre’. A brief overview of each of these follows.

The first, Image Theatre, is a series of methods that invite participants to create still images with their bodies. Boal claimed that when participants use their bodies instead of their voices to express meaning, these images can sometimes be closer to participants' true feelings, because embodied language can bypass rational defence mechanisms or self-censorship. Image Theatre is often used as a warm-up, in preparation for the more formal theatre productions that follow.

[Page 774]Invisible Theatre is performed in public spaces where people are unaware of the actors in their midst. In his book Games for Actors and Non-Actors (2002), Boal lists examples of actors who have sparked heated debates on the theme of sexual harassment in the Paris Metro, the Swedish medical system in a Stockholm ferry boat and the topic of racism in various unsuspecting cafés. When engaging in Invisible Theatre, it is important that the actors rehearse their dialogue and timing privately in advance. Although there is an element of improvisation in that the actors do not know how their audience will respond, the key themes they want to communicate, and the extreme positions on those themes, must be made clear ahead of time. In this form of street theatre, actors are very much dependent on the audience and must be confident that they themselves and the unsuspecting audience members have the ability and the knowledge to address the issues at hand. Unlike other forms of street theatre, however, audience members remain unaware that they were participants in an Invisible Theatre performance and are therefore not left with the impression that they were part of a didactic interaction. Scholars such as Bonnie Burstow have discussed the ethical dimension of this kind of theatre.

Forum Theatre is the technique most frequently associated with Boal. In the forum setting, a play is constructed around pressing issues in the community, and the protagonists are always represented as encountering oppressive situations in which they lose. That is, the plot reaches a negative climax and then ends—no resolution is given. The play is performed once in its entirety and then started afresh a second time. During the second performance, audience members are invited to yell ‘Stop!’ at any time and come on stage to replace a character with whose struggle they identify. When they do come on stage, these audience members try to change the outcome of events so that the protagonist, in changing her or his behaviour, can also change the outcome of the oppressive interaction.

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